‘If you could but hear, what a tale we would tell.

We could give you the

start of the spiral, the hidden story of your elders, rooted deep beneath
your surface, running through your rivers, coursing in your veins’

‘If you would come, sit among us, earth yourselves, we could unlock the
ancient tale, the one we’re dying to tell and bring the people to a standstill,
with our story…..’

“Once there was a great king who went riding in the countryside. By the
road, day after day, he saw an old man planting fig trees. When the king’s
curiosity became too much for him to hold, he approached the man
demanding he explain why he was planting fig trees. “You are old, you
will never see the fruits of your labor; you will never eat the figs from these
trees.” Patiently, the old man responded: “I came into this world that was
already full of trees bearing fruit for me to eat! I don’t plant these trees for
me; I plant them for my grandchildren.”

One day a Hawk flew over the desert. The Hawk saw the Tree and sat
on its branch. He looked around the desert and said:
"You are a strange Tree, why do you keep on living among these dead
hot sands? Who needs it?
"You". the Tree answered.
"Me?" the Hawk was surprised, "I don't need you."
 The Tree told, "But if not me, you would have to sit on the hot sand
instead of my branches. If not me, someone, seeing you sitting on the
tree alone, would say that nobody needs you, too and would ask you
what you live for. Sitting on my branches you, Hawk, think that I need
you. 
The Hawk thought about it and had to agree with the Tree. If there was
no Tree, the hawk would feel himself alone and useless among this vast
desert.
 
Everybody needs somebody. God has created everything with a
purpose. What we need to do is to synchronize our minds and souls
withe the vision of God, instead of finding faults in people, events and
circumstances.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever

knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach
learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient
law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from

eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me
is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play
of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to
form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know

nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live
out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust
that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has
something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is
not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and
your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads
away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back
again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you,
or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind
at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing
reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from
one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a
memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every
path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave
is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own
childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful,
just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long
as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to
trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our
thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen
to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what
he is. That is home. That is happiness.”